How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back
is episode eleven of Season Two of Futurama. It was written by Bill Odenkirk and guest starred Nora Dunn. Synopsis Hermes Conrad is excited because the Central Bureaucracy is conducting an inspection the next day, and he expects to be promoted to a Grade 35 bureaucrat. Leela hosts a poker game with her former co-workers from Applied Cryogenics at the office that night, and Bender cheats via the use of X-ray glasses. Unfortunately, he accidentally gives himself away when he mentions seeing a worm inside Leela's old boss, prompting her co-workers to grab the glasses. On the run from the other players, he takes refuge in Hermes’ office, but the other players find him, and the savage beating he receives trashes the office. The mess in his office loses Hermes his promotion, and the inspector, Morgan Proctor, places a suicidal Hermes on paid vacation, "the ultimate penalty", and appoints herself acting Planet Express bureaucrat. Dr. Zoidberg suggests Hermes and his wife LaBarbara take a trip to Spa 5, the sauna planet that gives him a bucket of krill for every patient he sends there. Fry gains a new title: Executive Delivery Boy. Morgan Proctor, who has a fetish for slovenly men (in her words, she is "surrounded by neat freaks all the time"), begins a secret affair with Fry (a "dirty, dirty boy!"), while Hermes and his wife discover that Spa 5 is actually a forced labor camp. After Bender discovers the illicit affair, Morgan downloads his personality and intelligence to a disk, turning him into a mindless drone, who can only say "I am Bender, please insert girder." She also sends the disk off to the Central Bureaucracy for filing. Hermes begins to use his natural managerial skills to reorganize the labor camp for efficiency, oblivious to the torment of his fellow workers. The rest of the Planet Express staff infiltrate the Central Bureaucracy in order to recover Bender’s mind. One of the many employees they encounter is a Beholder Monster, a Dungeons & Dragons monster, who simply hopes not to be exposed for sleeping on the job. They discover the master in-pile, an enormous pile of pneumatic tube capsules, only one of which contains Bender’s brain. The Planet Express crew is daunted by the giant pile, but Hermes has returned from Spa 5. He had made the labor camp so efficient that they only needed one Australian man to perform the labor. In a musical number, Hermes sorts the master in-pile, recovering the disk with Bender’s personality. Bender says "I'm Bender baby, please insert liquor!". He is restored to his original rank, a Grade 36 bureaucrat, by the head of the Central Bureaucracy for sorting the master in-pile, but immediately demoted to Grade 38 for finishing two seconds early, something bureaucrats should never do. Since Morgan was still in charge of Planet Express, she fires Fry for exposing her affair. However, Hermes exposes a mistake Morgan made on her high school prom date papers, having stamped it only four times instead of the standard five. Number 1.0 promotes him to grade 37 for this, and in turn, orders his assistants to get the papers needed to have Morgan taken away. The Professor re-hires Hermes, at severely reduced pay, and Fry asks if he can come back at a severely reduced pay as well. Hermes lets him and then gives severely reduced pay for everyone. Zoidberg begins his own musical number but the show immediately ends. Ongoing Themes Hermes-isms * Sweet gorilla of Manila * Sweet somethin' of someplace Hermes and Zoidberg As if relations between Hermes and Zoidberg weren't strained enough, Zoidberg unwittingly recommends to Hermes and La Barbara the forced-labor camp Spa 5 as a vacation getaway. However, the relationship remains complicated: it is Zoidberg who gives them a ride back to Earth from Spa 5, and Hermes happily includes Zoidberg in the performance of the Bureaucrat Song, suggesting that he holds no grudge. Fry and Leela Fry has an affair with Bureaucrat Proctor. Character Arcs Hermes steps into his role as company bureaucrat. Doppelgängers When Fry is afraid that Bureaucrat Proctor is about to harm him, he claims to be "the other Fry", the one that's spelled with a p-h. References Category:Season Two Category:Articles in need of a re-write Category:Articles in need of citation